Last week, heralded by a faux-penitent Instagram post pleading patience and understanding for his “wrongs and rights,” Future dropped a self-titled project that wedged itself in the same space. Summer 2015’s album, DS2, his inaugural debut at the top of the Billboard 200 - and to that point, the purest distillation of his wantonly petty, wincing, vengeful ethos - spent a good portion of its 90-minute run time between anger and bargaining. For instance, on Monster, October 2014’s kick-start to an unparalleled three-tape run, Meaghan Garvey wrote that Future was tumbling headlong through the first four stages, losing momentum just as acceptance came into view. Realizing I may be reading emotional depth into places it might not exist, placing Future’s constellation of projects in the Kübler-Ross model is a fun exercise. Ladies and gentlemen, this is what we would call being “fucked up in the game.” As for the stoked flame beneath Future’s churn, I’d wager that it’s a combination of the fact that self-inflicted losses are truly the most painful, and well, this: Hndrxx sounds so great because Future is overfull with disposable transgressions, and releasing them in tandem allowed us to appreciate both the raucous night before and the hangover that lasts the entire next day in sharp contrast.
The longer answer lies somewhere in the general excess of Future’s music - both in pure, incessant quantity as well as in theme.
Why? The short answer is this, which is true a lot of the time: But I happily accept this sort of emotionally stunted hedo-solipsism from Future and not from Drake. Not that the notionally awful gender politics are a new thing. And it’s a pretty shitty truth but it’s still, you know, his truth? As a matter of course, on “My Collection,” Hndrxx’s opening track, Future’s truth comes out. Especially since the Kanye-featuring “I Won,” which was intended as a sonnet for Kim and Ciara, the new First WAGs, ultimately positioned the two as collectibles. A lie of omission covers all sorts of things, the most glaring of which is the idea that Future could be happy with fewer than two women. Though it had a few truly wonderful moments - like “Benz Friendz,” featuring André 3000’s yearly journey down from the peak of Everest to tell us all about ourselves - Honest’s confessions didn’t feel wholly true. I just think it’s funny how Future’s sophomore effort, Honest, was actually obscurantist.